Issue #001 March 19, 2026

Four things worth
your next three minutes.

One thing happening in AI. One career insight. One paper or tool. One hot take.
That's the whole issue.


The inference cost curve just broke — and everyone is repositioning

Inference costs dropped ~10× in 18 months — AI is shifting from a product feature to core infrastructure, the way cloud storage did. Companies that treated it as a cost center are quietly reframing it as a margin lever.

Your first job isn't about the tech stack — it's about reading the room

New grads over-index on tech stack and under-index on the thing that drives promotions: understanding how decisions actually get made. Map the informal power structure before you optimize anything else.

Tool worth knowing: Cursor — and what it's actually changing

Cursor (and AI-native editors like it) shift your job from writing code to specifying and verifying it — recent data shows up to 55% faster task completion on well-scoped work. The gap between "can write code" and "can think in systems" just got a lot more visible.

Prompt engineering as a job title will be gone in two years — and that's fine

"Prompt engineer" is becoming a baseline skill, not a job title — like knowing Excel. Go deep on a domain first (data, systems, product) and let AI fluency be the multiplier.